Openomics 2018http://www.openthemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/25998/feed
enThe Growth Sutrahttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/the-growth-sutra
<p>THE STORY OF India’s economic expansion at the best—and worst—of times could evoke the opening line of an old classic. The book, as you may or may not have guessed, is the Brahma Sutra. It’s in Sanskrit and its first sentence, ‘<em>Athatoh Brahma jigyaasa</em>’, an entreaty unto the truth that’s ultimately beyond us, says it all.</p>
<p>The emergence of the Indian economy is mostly about mundane stuff like money, but it’s a tale too full of known unknowns to capture with due accuracy, let alone tell. The good news is that India appears to be in the throes of a furious debate over what would work for Indians to ‘better their condition’—an urge that Adam Smith lamented was lost on people here—without taking either the Free Market or Socialist model as the be-all and end-all of it. This means the argument is open to all but confined to none. Many of the country’s challenges, after all, are <em>sui generis</em> and not amenable to off-the-shelf solutions. It also means having to undergo a variety of trials and tribulations now that the Mixed Economy has by and large been deemed a disaster, Liberalisation has proven too slow in its redressal of poverty, and the urgency of success has gone sky high in an eruption of aspirations across the country.</p>
<p>At this juncture, there is enough data to sober up the hardiest of believers in India’s inevitable entry to the world’s big league <em>a la</em> China. The global environment is no longer as favourable as it once was to export-led growth the Asian way. While dollar inflows have been robust, a slump in domestic investment has persisted for so long that few expect private enterprise to provide the boost it did during the go-go years of the past decade. Sclerotic credit allocation today can be traced in large part to excesses of that period. Under pressure to pick up the slack, the State has reversed its withdrawal from the economy over the past year, as the flappy fiscal deficit attests. Bond markets began flashing danger signals at least six months ago, and now stock markets also seem to have lost their verve.</p>
<p>Yet, as optimists note, the twin disruptions of demonetisation and a switch-over to a far-from- simple GST are now firmly in the past; inflation remains under RBI control; bankruptcy resolutions have begun; industrial production is on an upswing again; and other indicators of a revival ahead suggest that it’s myopic to be gloomy.</p>
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<p>This year's edition of Openomics offers a wide angled look at what might soon change—and what already has —by way of policies and private initiatives that make a difference</p>
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<p>If this year’s Budget earned extra criticism, it’s mainly because an enlarged command of national resources by the State goes against one of the basic tenets of a market economy. But the big lesson of the <em>laissez faire</em> approach, as gleaned from the US victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, is simply that it’s better to have more minds determine how resources are allocated than a few. And this principle may have sunk in sufficiently to ensure that India’s economy stays open. Aberrations need not cramp the space for market forces to play a heroic role. Sure, economic agents may be shifting around a bit, but most of them are as responsive as ever to the incentives that make an economy tick, perhaps even more so.</p>
<p>AS AN UPDATE on India’s emergence story, this year’s edition of Openomics offers a wide-angled look at what might soon change— and what already has—by way of policies and private initiatives that make a difference. For all the blame traded and hands wrung over India’s scandal stricken public sector banks, calls for pragmatic reforms can no longer be dismissed. Banks now figure on groan lists all around. Patience with financial fraud has worn thin, and since a lot of folk let their gullibility outweigh their grasp of risk, regulatory clamps on Ponzi schemes could aid the larger cause of turning Indian gamblers into investors. With Aadhaar now an anxiety as much as an identity, a sensitive addressal of informational insecurity would also help, even if some of the damage done cannot be undone.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Big Data of the impersonal kind is abustle with opportunities for entrepreneurs with big ideas. As for public funded projects, attention to healthcare could work welfare wonders if guided by inclusive ideals. Even a shift in an entertainment paradigm may hold the promise of sensibilities evolving in diverse new ways. All this, even as recent Indian successes in cricket speak of an aggressive approach to making the most of what little is at hand.</p>
<p>What’s truly scarce for busybodies is time, a far cry from the days when India was this fabled land where ‘<em>ek</em> minute’ could mean anything from ‘right now’ to an eternity. Time is time. Always short, it needs to be put to optimal use. In that, if little else, we’re all economists now.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Thegrowthsutra.jpg?itok=uRYIFNIT" /><div>BY: Aresh Shirali</div><div>Node Id: 24112</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 15:48:33 +0000vijayopen24112 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Big Bank Theoryhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/the-big-bank-theory
<p>THE INDIAN BANKING system has been in the news for the wrong reasons lately. A certain diamond merchant, who shares the same surname as the Prime Minister, has quietly fled the country after being accused of defrauding the Punjab National Bank of Rs 11,700 crore. Add this to the amount of Rs 8,500 crore owed by another flamboyant businessman now in exile, and you get almost two-thirds of the total government health budget. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg.</p>
<p>The Indian banking system is saddled with non-performing assets (NPAs), which is a polite term to describe loans that are never going to be repaid because they are to a large degree nothing but organised loot carried out by businessmen in connivance with bank officials. The Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Stability Report (December 2017) points out thatNPAs stand at 10.2 per cent of all assets, while assets that are described as ‘stressed’ and which are in effect NPAs stand at 12.8 per cent. Together, this is nearly a quarter of all assets, even though that is believed to be an underestimate.</p>
<p>We now have the usual clamour for reforms that follows any major scam. Some are calling for privatisation of public-sector banks (which constitute about 70 per cent of the banking system), while others are advocating governance reforms that shield public sector banks from the nexus between businessmen, political parties and bank officials that constitutes a textbook model of crony capitalism.</p>
<p>Put this way, privatisation seems like an obvious solution, but that would be misguided for two fundamental reasons.</p>
<p>First, the private sector in India is not a model of virtue. As was pointed out by State Bank of India Chairman Rajnish Kumar, it is private sector companies that are the main defaulters if we look at who are hauled up to the National Company Law Tribunal for insolvency proceedings. Large borrowers account for 56 per cent of advances but 83 per cent of NPAs. And, there have been enough scandals involving private banks and financial institutions, from running Ponzi schemes with the money of small savers to money laundering during demonetisation. Also, the ratio of NPAs to assets for scheduled commercial banks is 9.6 per cent, not too far behind that of the public-sector banks, namely, 12.5 per cent.</p>
<p>Second, public sector banks serve rural areas, where more than two-thirds Indians live, much more than private sector banks. No surprises here—the private sector moves in only where profits are to be made, and so the public sector has to step in to fill the vacuum.</p>
<p>Moreover, poorer borrowers such as small farmers—like the ones who marched into Mumbai recently to protest their dire economic condition—depend largely on informal lenders. While state governments waive loans of Indian farmers that amount to thousands of crores, this applies to formal credit only and does not benefit poor farmers who rely on informal lenders. According to the All-India Debt and Investment Survey (2012), nearly 48 per cent of farmers took loans from moneylenders and landlords, often at exorbitant interest rates, which is often the back story to news on farmer suicides.</p>
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<p>While public sector banks appear highly scandal prone, there have been enough scams involving their private counterparts</p>
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<p>So, while there are valid fears about inefficiency and corruption in the public sector and political interference in the operation of public-sector banks, a knee-jerk response of ‘let’s privatise’, like ‘off with her head’, will be misguided if we do not take into account the above considerations. We need to understand the deeper systemic issues.</p>
<p>The debate surrounding the crisis in the Indian banking sector has echoes of the old debate about central planning versus markets that Economics college students in India until the early 90s had to study, and of the rhetoric about how our mixed economic system was supposed to have been the best of both worlds.</p>
<p>There may be something very Indian about liking things that are ‘mixed’—just look at the menus in restaurants or popular home-cooked items like khichdi. This may be an expression of our inherent ‘unity in diversity’ ethos or syncretic nature. But more generally, as with asset portfolios, ‘mixed’ sounds good since it seems more balanced and therefore less risky.</p>
<p>India’s mixed economy was guided by Five-Year Plans. The Government had control over the commanding heights of the economy through the Planning Commission and various ministries, and the private sector was allowed to operate but as an obedient subordinate to the public sector. As students, we thought, ‘Who could be possibly against planning?’ After all, in almost every aspect of life, planning is good (the opposite of it being chaos).</p>
<p>Those were days of innocence.</p>
<p>In subsequent decades, the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe imploded like buildings in an earthquake; China continued its rapid journey to a more market- based economy that had started with privatising collective farms in the late 70s; and India embarked on a path of economic liberalisation in the early 90s, becoming a much more open and much less regulated economy and moving away from what was disparagingly called a model of ‘post-office socialism’, where the entire economy is run like a post-office with its associated delays, inefficiencies and lack of variety, dynamism, and innovation.</p>
<p>Somewhere along the way, the words ‘mixed economy’ and ‘planning’ have become nearly obsolete.</p>
<p>In hindsight, we now realise that with ‘mixing’ there was no guarantee that you would get the best of both worlds—you could also get the worst of both! As with the famous story about someone very beautiful proposing to marry someone who was very intelligent to have a child who combines the best of both parents’ traits, what’s the guarantee that the child will inherit the looks of the former and the brains of the latter and not the other way around?</p>
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<p>There will always have to be a mix of private and public banks. The question is, what is the right balance and how is it to be achieved?</p>
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<p>Central planning didn’t work out because if a single entity— the state—is given charge of planning for the whole economy, it would need to be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and in possession of perfect foresight for it to work. What is worse, even if the central planning authority did possess such a capacity, we would need to have the confidence that it will act in the best interests of society. But there is a basic fallacy here. The moment you have coercive powers to do what you want, you have no incentive to stay benevolent and use it for the greater good, as your own survival would depend on putting your own interest above that of rest of society.</p>
<p>No wonder, then, that centrally planned economies eventually imploded. They were unable to generate enough economic surplus for the population. Moreover, as central planning does not work without coercion, these countries had political systems that were (and in some cases, continue to be) effectively dictatorships.</p>
<p>If we think of the typical problems we associate with India’s public sector banks (or the public sector more broadly), they correspond to the typical problems of central planning. There are problems of information which results in bureaucratic sluggishness and inefficiency. There are problems of incentives—if you expect to be subsidised by the taxpayer for any losses that arise, you will have no incentive to be proactive in avoiding losses. And, there is the problem of political interference—if the Government has direct control over those running the banks, cronyism is bound to arise.</p>
<p>If central planning does not work, and that is why the public sector has inherent limitations, do we then just need to embrace a pure market-based system? Isn’t that the spirit of liberalisation and reforms that Narendra Modi was elected to carry out?</p>
<p>The problem is that pure market systems do not exist anywhere and for good reason. Even in the supposedly most ‘free market’ country in the Western World, the United States, total government spending at the federal, state and local levels is approximately 36.1 per cent ofGDP.</p>
<p>There are several reasons why a pure market system cannot work.</p>
<p>Without proper regulation and rule of law, there is nothing to stop markets from exploiting the poor and the uninformed, cheating workers and consumers, or damaging the environment. Left to market forces, essential public goods like health and education will not be provided at adequate levels except for the very rich who can (and often do) effectively create their own ‘gated’ economy run like a club, literally and metaphorically.</p>
<p>It is well-known that market economies by their very nature tend to generate inequality—and eventually, instability. There is no more potentially destabilising force in any economic system than the desperation of those who are pushed to the brink of survival, even when they are as peaceful as the distressed farmers in Maharashtra who marched to Mumbai. To prevent the discontent of large segments of the population from disrupting social and political order, governments need to provide a social safety net for the economically disadvantaged. Even if there is no moral concern for the condition of the less unfortunate, sheer pragmatism would dictate such measures.</p>
<p>But beyond these general drawbacks, financial markets constitute a particularly vulnerable aspect of a market economy for a number of reasons.</p>
<p>First, financial returns depend on expectations of the future—popularly referred to as ‘market sentiments’—that are inherently uncertain and subject to swings in the mood of investors. This makes financial markets naturally prone to volatility, often leading to speculative bubbles and crashes.</p>
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<p>Since banks are ‘too big to fail’, given the risk of contagion to the financial system, government presence can't be wished away</p>
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<p>Second, there is a fundamental way in which financial transactions are different from other transactions. When you buy an apple or get a haircut, money is exchanged against a good or a service. But financial transactions involve the exchange of something real (namely, money) against only a promise—such as to repay a loan or pay dividends—that by its very nature is fragile and unreliable.</p>
<p>Third, there is the mutual dependence of financial claims. For example, banks lend to each other through the interbank market and so the insolvency of one bank infects all other banks through this interdependence. Moreover, if depositors get panicky and start withdrawing money, it may lead to a domino effect of bank runs that could threaten the whole economy.</p>
<p>In other words, financial impulses run through the economy like blood circulates in the human body; any infection in one part quickly spreads all through the body. That is why it is standard practice for governments in India and abroad (as in the 2008 financial crisis) to use taxpayer money to bail out failing banks and other financial institutions. This happens even if they were guilty of taking on bad risks out of greed or of colluding with unscrupulous businessmen who effectively embezzled the money entrusted by savers. They are ‘too big to fail’, given the risk of contagion to the entire financial system.</p>
<p>So, while privatisation does reduce government interference on a day-to-day basis, the presence of the government cannot be wished away. After all, you cannot have collective ownership of losses and private ownership of profits.</p>
<p>The challenge is to come up with a system of public ownership of equity in private banks that gives the Government some oversight of their management, as with a major shareholder and yet puts a firewall that prevents interference in day-to-day management by politicians and bureaucrats. Also needed is a governance and monitoring system that minimises the inherent incentive problems that arise if private banks know they will be bailed out in the event of big trouble.</p>
<p>AS MUCH AS the old debate about central planning versus markets is obsolete, we need to go beyond the privatisation versus nationalisation debate. There will always have to be a mix of the market and the Government, and a mix of private and public banks. The question is, what is the right balance and how is it to be achieved?</p>
<p>There is no magic formula that tells us what fraction of market or what fraction of government intervention is optimal. In fact, the search for such a formula is problematic in itself, for it traps us in a ‘central planner’ mindset again.</p>
<p>In an ever-changing and complex world inhabited by millions of economic actors, we cannot plan for the desired <em>outcomes</em> as there will always be some uncertainty. But we can agree on desirable <em>processes</em>. That will ensure we will stay on the right track, even though sometimes we may get lucky and sometimes unlucky. As an analogy, while we cannot plan for the exact meals we are going to have all through the year, as that might depend on availability, resources and our spontaneous desire at a given moment, we can agree on some general dietary rules and set a budget that will keep us happy and healthy on average.</p>
<p>The focus of banking sector reforms, more broadly of all economic activity, should be on creating transparent and uniform rules that apply to everyone and minimising the discretionary power of politicians and bureaucrats. This is where the recommendations of the PJ Nayak-headed Committee to Review Governance of Boards of Banks in India on reforming the governance of state-owned banks are worthy of serious attention. The operative principle should be to move away from discretion and micro-management by the Government beyond setting a clear policy goal about lending priorities for sectors not well served by commercial banks. That is the door through which most of the problems of corruption and inefficiency that beset the public-sector banks arise. Yet, these are precisely what gives the Government power and influence, and are thus unlikely to be voluntarily given up.</p>
<p>Even if we accept the premise that Modi is sincere in his desire to clean up the mess, his basic approach is that of a central planner who relies on heavy-handed measures of command-and-control using the administration. This is not just in the case of banking, but evident in the manner of implementation of Aadhaar, the stalled land acquisition bill, the ill-conceived and badly executed demonetisation exercise, and even the healthcare reforms that are currently underway. This is ironic, as Modi promised to dismantle the rusty pillars of the Nehruvian state and foster a more bottom-up entrepreneurial environment, putting faith in people.</p>
<p>Central planning is dead. Long live the spirit of the Central Planner!</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Banktheory1.jpg?itok=XGUIj_t4" /><div>BY: Maitreesh Ghatak</div><div>Node Id: 24111</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 15:13:33 +0000vijayopen24111 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Data Doctrine: More’s Lawhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/the-data-doctrine-more-s-law
<p>ONE OF MY best memories of my dozen-year career at Intel was being given a coffee table book, <em>One Digital Day</em> (1998), by Rick Smolan in collaboration with Intel. I had my then bosses Andy Grove, Gordon Moore and Craig Barrett sign the inside cover with comments. In his usual style, Andy demanded his ‘moving pictures within bound covers’ with a smiley. That was the true Andy style of encouraging you not to rest on your laurels but to always push forward.</p>
<p>In this book, we explored a world where a soldier could see his newborn via video conferencing and conservation biologists studied data from cheetahs implanted with microchips in South Africa all the way to Singaporeans having their favourite fruit durian delivered home instead of carrying it in a car with its smell left behind for days. It was the decade that analog data started becoming digital. I remember a meeting where top Hollywood directors stormed out saying they would never make their content digital as it made it easy to copy. Not too long after that, content did go digital and DVDs came into being. What we call ‘Big Data’ is the accumulation of all the digital data that we have been collecting. To understand its true potential, one needs to grasp its evolution. Gordon Moore famously said, “If the auto industry advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get half a million miles per gallon, and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it.” True to his prediction, the performance of microprocessors increased, prices fell, server farms sprouted with sumptuous storage space and the analog content that became digital found a permanent home in cyberspace. Fast forward into the first decade of the new millennium: Google, Facebook, YouTube and Netflix became household names, and Mark Andreessen introduced us to the concept of cloud computing. With all these developments, every byte that travelled across cyberspace had an eternal presence hovering over us. Billions of photos, videos, personal status updates, professional dealings, profits and losses moved from paper to the personal computer. Rooms of physical paper file storage transformed into bits and bytes of cyber storage. Over the last two decades, a lot of data was collected, collated and even discarded at regular intervals. Beyond the corridors of computer companies, the world took notice of the value of large data for the first time when human genome sequencing was completed in 2003. The realisation of the importance of data with a purpose, combined with higher levels of cyber security and cloud computing, enabled researchers from various disciplines to do something unique. They could strip large amounts of data of personal details and study it to observe patterns.</p>
<p>Worldwide Big Data and business analytics software revenues are expected to increase from nearly $122 billion in 2015 to over $187 billion in 2019, according to marketing strategy firm Fourquadrant. India has a huge opportunity to leapfrog the internet economy and move into the Big Data economy to claim a leadership role. Talent in India can dream up solutions to solve global problems and provide data analytics services to the world just as it did with software services, while Indian industries could use it to improve their own performance.</p>
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<p>Mapmaker remains one of the most robust and accurate crowd-sourced big data projects, allowing us to walk into any village in any country confident of finding our destination</p>
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<p>India has taken the lead in solving global problems before. By way of an example, consider this story. In 2004, a young engineer who moved from the US to India to be part of Google India’s founding team had an idea. At that time, most of the world’s map data was approximate at best. Map makers in most countries managed to plot a few cities and towns on the map, but there were no maps for streets within cities, let alone villages. Most of the mapping was done in what was deemed the ‘developed world’ of the US and parts of Europe, where the map data was gathered by professional surveyors and expensive GPS trucks.</p>
<p>Lalitesh Katragadda of Google spearheaded a programme called Google Mapmaker that took on all the possible challenges to solve the problem. The basic idea was simple. Around the world, over a billion phones were profuse generators of data. Of the thousands of people who lived on any street, at least one would be willing to map the neighbourhood if shown how. Could they be inspired to help create maps for those who had none? In my conversation with Lalitesh, I understood the power of this goal and the complexity of the problem. To map the unmapped world, the project had neither the money nor the time to hire mapping companies and involve huge government agencies. The plan was to enable netizens to become mappers.</p>
<p>It was an audacious effort to create and edit a large map that would be accurate and held trustworthy by people across countries of the so-called ‘emerging’ world. Lalitesh said that he wanted to build “a global product out of India that was for the other five billion who perpetually live in information darkness”. It was one of the first experiments that brought big data into the public domain. ¬¬There were four major challenges that had to be dealt with:</p>
<p>1) <em>Collection of data</em>. For most large data gathering—say, on individuals for a census—we can collect separate pieces of data and analyse it; relational databases store this information and can be sorted the way we want to study it. A map, however, is one large integral thing. One mistake made in mapping one part of the country could ripple across the entire map.</p>
<p>2) <em>Moving from Experts to Everyone.</em> When millions of people upload data, how do you make sure that they are drawing the right thing? And none of these people were professional GIS specialists who were believed to be the only ones trained at length to make maps under supervision.</p>
<p>3) <em>Ease of Using the Tool</em>. The interface used by folks from all walks of life had to be simple. It also had to let multiple people edit the map data at the same time.</p>
<p>4) <em>Authentication of Data</em>. How do you ensure that those uploading data are not making up towns and cities? At that time, crowd-sourced data had an accuracy of 40-60 per cent, but the bar set for Mapmaker was 97 per cent. With hundreds of thousands of people at work, accuracy was a challenge.</p>
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<p>Worldwide big data and business analytics software revenues are expected to increase from nearly $122 billion in 2015 to over $187 billion in 2019</p>
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<p>Lalitesh and another engineer, Sanjay Jain, took up the task on an empty floor in Google’s Bengaluru office and slowly expanded their team. Ordinary individuals from across South and South East Asia edited the map, powered by no-SQL databases, computational geometry, machine learning and creative UX. Mapmaker was launched in these two regions in 2008, made its way across 150 countries and then finally landed in Silicon Valley in 2012. This was the first time such a technology product was developed in India, launched in the ‘emerging’ world first and then made it to the ‘developed’ world.</p>
<p>The smallest bylanes in the most remote villages found their identity on the map alongside streets of large cities. When major floods hit Pakistan in 2010, maps uploaded by people from remote places were used as a guide for rescue operations. Mapmaker data was uploaded into Google Maps, making it available to a global audience. In the initial stages, it took four to six months for a street uploaded into Mapmaker to be authenticated and put on Google Maps. Soon, this time reduced to nine seconds. Mapmaker has since been shut down and its features moved into Google Maps, which has become ubiquitous. It remains one of the most robust and accurate crowd-sourced large-data projects, allowing us to walk into any village in any country confident of finding our destination. Behind it lie many smaller stories—of a person who drove thousands of kilometres on his motorcycle to map the most remote areas, for example, and of others working against the odds.</p>
<p>The true purpose of any data is its ability to tell a story, make a prediction, peek into a possible future and ultimately empower its users. The consumer products industry has been the master of analysing data collected through focus groups, surveys and savvy minds that understood behavioural psychology. Companies would know our wants and needs even before we ourselves knew them and present their products in such a way that we felt compelled to purchase them. Now, imagine what happens when we combine the analytical capability of such a company with large amounts of reliable data and open up applications that go beyond enticing consumers to buy products. We can make predictions of disease, natural calamities and climate change as well as professional choices. Here are a few Indian examples.</p>
<p>BELONG.CO, FOUNDED by Vijay Sharma, Rishabh Kaul, Sudheendra Chilappagari and Saiteja Veera, is a new kind of recruitment firm. Using predictive analysis and machine learning, their platform is able to assist employers in hiring individuals who are best suited for the jobs at hand. Their algorithm looks for people whose interests and skills match the company’s needs by studying their behaviour on the web, and can approach a candidate before even they themselves know they are looking for a change.</p>
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<p>Since copious amounts of data are needed to make any prediction, a lot of the buzz has been about collecting and finding better ways to store, manage, analyse and make sense of it</p>
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<p>Sunita Maheshwari of Telerad RX/DX, a healthcare services firm, told me that for years they would routinely delete X-rays from their hard disk to save space. Then they started working with an Artificial Intelligence company that wanted as much data as possible to be able to detect patterns. This allows a radiologist to identify the problem area on a digital image quicker. It also lets big-city doctors reach out and connect with persons in Tier 2/3 cities, run tests using the internet (with no other special equipment), coach local nurses or compounders on taking care of patients, and then feed the data on patients and their results into the AI system—anonymously—to help it improve its utility.</p>
<p>Applications in the field of education are no less promising. Prasad Ram, <em>aka</em> Pram, applied his years of experience at Google to start a non-profit organisation called Gooru. After years of working with students across ages, he had an interesting observation. The fundamental problem with the education system is that we are asking everyone to reach the same destination not knowing their personal starting point. Different students in the same class might be at different levels of a subject’s understanding, and it is difficult to pinpoint which concept isn’t understood by whom. Ram’s platform has developed tools to enable a student to spot his or her specific area of deficiency and customise the learning to catch up. His next goal is to bring the same clarity to a student who might not have access to a personal laptop and a learning system in rural India.</p>
<p>With all these examples, we can see a trend on the multiple uses of Big Data. India has a huge role to play in being a creator as well as a beneficiary in this data economy.</p>
<p>Since copious amounts of data are needed to make any prediction, a lot of the buzz has been about collecting large quantities and finding better ways to store, manage, analyse and make sense of it. It’s in my conversations with scientists Uma Ramakrishnan and Shannon Olsson that I truly understood what makes Big Data so meaningful.</p>
<p>The human brain is an enormously complex organ, as we all know, with over 80 billion neurons. Despite all this neuron power, we cannot locate objects as quickly or efficiently as a mosquito can find a human. Yet, the mosquito only has about 100,000 neurons in its brain. Its precision targeting ability must lie in how those 100,000 neurons work together. Likewise, it is not the amount of data, but how storehouses of it interact with one another that make the difference. And it is scientists processing the data that we pass by everyday without thinking, be it tiger faeces or insect behaviour, and make sense out of it that points to endless possibilities. There might exist enough computer power to match the collective human brain power, but that’s just raw data. The real magic is in the way we all become scientists, studying all that surrounds us and making sense of it in our own way. It’s in our ability to become the child who asks ‘why’ incessantly. And it is by asking ‘Why not?’ that we stay true to our purpose. In Shannon’s words, “In this information age, our greatest challenge is not locating information, it’s knowing what to do with it when we have it. And we still can’t even compete with a mosquito on that level!”</p>
<p>As though to answer Andy Grove’s demand, albeit a couple of decades later, a new book by Rick Smolan, <em>The Good Fight</em>, has arrived and it does have the moving pictures within its covers, thanks to mobile technology and augmented reality. Many technologies that we argued over, discussed, dreamt of and invested in while I was at Intel are a reality today. Some fell by the wayside, while others went beyond our wildest imagination. Delivering Durian to a Singaporean home through e-commerce was an innovation replaced by drones delivering medicines to rural areas, which also became old news even before it caught the public eye. It is in those corridors as a young professional that I learnt that the only constant in life is change and that to stay relevant, we have to reinvent our businesses, our homes and ourselves at a exponential pace. While it is thrilling to see some of the futures we had imagined come true, it is still that signature of Andy that leaves me with a lump in my throat, grateful for having had an opportunity to learn from the best. Despite all the Big Data, it’s the smallest moments, the simplest acts of kindness, that stay with us forever.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/More%27slaw.jpg?itok=3UULFlHv" /><div>BY: Lakshmi Pratury</div><div>Node Id: 24110</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:47:00 +0000vijayopen24110 at http://www.openthemagazine.comPonzi Schemes: The Pyramid Fraudhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/ponzi-schemes-the-pyramid-fraud
<p>SOON AFTER giving up his Indian cricket team captaincy in September 2007, Rahul Dravid gave an interview to the news agency <em>PTI</em>. The name of the journalist who interviewed him was Sutram Suresh. This month, both of them hit the news again, but in a somewhat different context. Dravid had lost crores in a Ponzi scheme and the man who introduced him to it was Suresh who had left journalism to be an LIC agent. The main man behind the scam, one Raghavendra Srinath, had appointed a number of LIC agents as the second rung to bring investments into his scheme. Dravid wasn’t the only sportsman to find his money disappear. Saina Nehwal and Prakash Padukone were also victims. As <em>The Indian Express</em> reported of Dravid’s police complaint: ‘The former cricketer reportedly said he was paid the promised returns on investment of Rs 20 crore made through Vikram Investments in the past but the firm had not paid returns on Rs 4 crore invested since 2017. Suresh, who was produced in court last week, said investments worth Rs 34 crore made by him in Vikram Investments had been defrauded by the owner of the company, Srinath, and others. Vikram Investments has been accused of fraud by several people, who said the firm lured high-net worth investors with offers of 40 to 50 per cent annual returns on their principal amounts. Police have accused Srinath and four people who worked as agents, including Suresh, to bring in investors, of defrauding over 800 people to the tune of over Rs 300 crore.’</p>
<p>Anyone with an understanding of finance knows that no one can promise a 40 per cent annual return. The greatest investor in the world is Warren Buffett and the returns he made over his lifetime are around 20 per cent annually. Yet Dravid, not exactly an illiterate villager, easily fell for the scam. He is not alone either. India has been a fertile field of Ponzi schemes, its victims ranging across every class and community. In recent times, Ponzis like the Saradha Chit Fund scam, Q Net, SpeakAsia, etcetera, have looted gullible investors of thousands of crores.</p>
<p>In a classic Ponzi scheme, a high rate of return is offered to lure people and the new money is used to pay off old investors who want to redeem their investment. This keeps running so long as the money coming into the scheme is greater than the money leaving. When this equation is on the verge of reversal, or often much before that, the person behind the scheme takes the corpus and disappears. On why so many get attracted to Ponzi schemes, Vivek Kaul, economic commentator and author of the ‘Easy Money’ trilogy, who has written extensively on numerous Ponzis in recent times, points to a famous quote by the economist Charles Kindleberger: ‘There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.’ “Typically, someone around you has invested in a scheme. The scamster is interested in reaching a certain level of scale. Initial guys tend to get paid off. Then they go talking about it and become votaries for that scheme. The largest Ponzi schemes are essentially word of mouth,” he says.</p>
<p>There are two broad categories of this fraud. One involves an impossibly high return of investment. For example, in the mid-90s, Ashok Sheregar, an employee of Mumbai’s bus transportation body, BEST, began a scheme that within weeks doubled the money anyone put in. Those who invested were also made agents by promising them commissions. When it went bust, by one estimate over 60,000 people in the entire city had lost their money. In the Saradha Chit Fund scam in West Bengal, the scale of the Ponzi became gargantuan with an entire industrial conglomerate being set up through revolving money and aided by the patronage of politicians.</p>
<p>The second category have pyramid or multi-level marketing schemes, where a company offers a product but the real money is made by charging the people appointed to distribute and sell it. The product is immaterial to the business model. “The main money is made by getting in newer members to pay the membership fee, which pays off people who entered the scheme earlier than the others,” says Kaul. An example of this is a company called QNet, which claimed to sell products ranging from bio discs that enhanced ‘the natural properties of water as well as the human body’s energy systems’ to gold coins to vacations. People would be asked to pay a lump sum in return for assured returns. They would have to get other members and thus the chain would grow. The police cracked down on it and when the anticipatory bail application of five arrested directors of the scheme came up, the High Court observed, ‘The motto of the company ‘sell more, earn more’ appears very attractive and innocuous… the true motto is ‘sell more earn more’ by fooling people. In fact it is a chain where a person is fooled and then he is trained to fool others to earn money.’</p>
<p>PONZI SCHEMES ARE pervasive in India. Sucheta Dalal, managing editor of <em>Moneylife</em> magazine, which has been relentlessly campaigning against them, recalls holding a financial literacy seminar for poor scholarship students and being unsure of including the subject. “I thought I will start talking about it and if I find blank looks, I will wind it up quickly and move on to something else. I was completely stunned at the high level of interest. They had so many questions, and each of the kids was saying, ‘<em>Mere</em> building <em>mein aisa hota hai</em>, <em>mere</em> building <em>mein waisa hota hai</em>’. One tells me, ‘I am so glad that I attended the seminar because I didn’t know what was wrong with [a scheme]. I kept telling my mom there has to be something wrong, why will someone give you such high returns? Now you have explained to me why it is wrong and I will be able to tell her’,” says Dalal.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A recent example of a fraud involving a Ponzi structure is the Nirav Modi case, where fresh LoUs were used to illegally pay off earlier ones</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She points out a few commonalities across all Ponzis. “One is extremely high returns. Second, a mandatory ingredient, [initially] they find a way of making the returns available to you really fast. If it is SpeakAsia, you fill up these surveys and get a cheque within 15 days. There is nothing that convinces somebody more about a scam’s genuineness than to get a cheque. People are then waving it around and, the next instant, you have family, neighbours and everyone participating. They are taking the next person’s money and giving it to the first. Then there are 10 more whose money is passed on,” she says.</p>
<p>The numbers involved in these frauds are staggering. In 2016, the 22nd Conference of CBI and State ACBx, Vigilance Bureaux, Economic Offence Wings (EOWs) discussed the spread of Ponzi schemes and plugging legal loopholes. In his address, the then CBI director Anil Sinha had said that the agency alone was “investigating cases in which more than 6 crore investors/victims spread across 26 states involving [about] Rs 85,000 crore of public money. There are hundreds of criminal cases with state police and EOWs”.</p>
<p>“Look at all the bank losses we are talking about today and look at Rs 85,000 crore that people have lost [in Ponzi schemes] and nobody even puts it on the front page of the papers,” says Dalal.</p>
<p>The basic Ponzi trick, where new money is used to paper over an old default, has been in play in sectors like real estate before the recent Real Estate Regulation Act came into force. “What these builders used to do was announce a project, collect money against it and use it somewhere else like paying off debt or buying land. Let’s call it Project A, for which money has already been raised. Then they start a Project B, raise money against that and use it to complete Project A. Likewise for Project B, Project C and so on. But many projects were not developed or delivered on time when their ability to launch a new project and raise money against it collapsed. RERA came in for that and [made it] mandatory that 70 per cent of the money raised for a project must be used for it,” says Kaul.</p>
<p>The most recent example of a fraud involving a Ponzi structure is the Nirav Modi case, where fresh Letters of Undertaking were used to illegally pay off earlier LoUs until they added up to over Rs 11,000 crore. Even though not a classic Ponzi scam, it had a curious fallout. Soon after it broke, the Union Cabinet approved the introduction of The Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Bill, 2018. Said the Press Information Bureau press release: ‘The bill is aimed at tackling the menace of illicit deposit taking activities in the country. Companies/ institutions running such schemes exploit existing regulatory gaps and lack of strict administrative measures to dupe poor and gullible people of their hard-earned savings.’ Such a law had been first mooted in the Union Budget two years ago but thanks to Nirav Modi, there was an impetus to finally get it going. By a <em>The Times of India</em> report, the bill proposes that ‘those soliciting unregulated deposits will face a jail term of one to five years. Unregistered entities, which are accepting deposits, will be liable for up to seven years in jail. Those who default on repayment of unregulated deposits will have to face an additional term of three years...’</p>
<p>EAS Sarma, a former secretary with the Union Finance and Power ministries who has been campaigning for the Government to curb Ponzi schemes, says that at present there is no institutionalised intelligence gathering on firms that suddenly appear from nowhere and cheat large numbers of depositors within months. “To stop this, there should be coordinated effort among the state investigating agencies to keep track of such companies by regularly cross-checking information at the field level with the business associations, commercial tax officers, the police and so on. These state agencies must further be able to cross-check [their findings] with Central regulators like SEBI, RBI, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Ministry of Consumer Affairs, ED, DRI and so on. The latter should also disseminate information to the states. All this cannot happen through correspondence. Now that we have the possibility of having inter-connected computerised databases, quick retrieval of information and quick verification have become easy. We do not seem to be building such databases and using them,” says Sarma.</p>
<p>The Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Bill, 2018, does propose a central database, but, while the law is an advance, how effective it will be depends on implementation. In a recent <em>Moneylife</em> column, Dalal wrote, ‘There has to be a robust process for reporting fraudulent and unregulated deposit-collection which will need to be followed up by quick action by the competent authority at the Centre or the state to stop and wind up such schemes… Regulators’ accountability is the key; but one is unclear how another Central legislation is going to ensure this, when there is no attempt to make existing financial regulators accountable to savers.’</p>
<p>“Who is going to initiate the action has always been the problem and will remain the problem,” she says.</p>
<p>Prithvi Haldea, founder of Watchoutinvestors. com, a national registry of economic defaulters whose names have come up in orders issued by regulators, says the number of Ponzi scams that have been caught so far is still very small, the real number being many times that. “There is no surveillance mechanism existing on any schemes operating across the country. There is very little fear of law. Then there are loopholes in the law. There is poor investigation. We have to increase our surveillance using the state and Central machinery. Pick up early signs of any such schemes being launched. Ultimately all these schemes are done in public because public money is involved. There would be some hoarding, some poster, some advertisement, some agent. For example, a hoarding in a small village that says ‘if you want 14% annual return on your money come to us’ would be a warning signal. How can anybody promise 14 per cent? Number two, the mass media must increase financial awareness initiatives. And once you have caught an offender, then take stiff and substantive action, publicise that action to create a deterrent amongst others,” he says.</p>
<p>Also, once a Ponzi scam has been busted and those behind it caught, there is the question of investors getting their money back. On whether there have been such instances, Dalal says, “Not a single one that I know of.”</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/pyramidflaw1-lead.jpg?itok=WJYstKZ1" /><div>BY: Madhavankutty Pillai</div><div>Node Id: 24109</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:35:12 +0000vijayopen24109 at http://www.openthemagazine.comNational Therapyhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/national-therapy
<p>AT ITS MOST primitive, the idea of pooling the risk of bodily harm borne by individuals goes a long way back, perhaps all the way back to early man’s first grunt issued in warning of a wild beast that drew a ring of weapons out in group defence. Trial-and- error is probably all it took to make safety in numbers apparent. The very origin of language, the great leap that’s reckoned to have expanded the human brain about 300 millennia ago, is traced by some anthropologists to the exigencies of pack survival. Synaptic sizzles set off by twists of the tongue marked an inflexion point in evolution. For the next significant shield against danger, though, mankind had to await the invention of the zero—and the mathematical conquest of risk.</p>
<p>Going by what’s verifiably on record— rather than, say, delusional posts on social media—modernity got its big break only in the Common Era’s migratory phase, once a variety of ideas began to span the globe and challenge one another. As Peter Bernstein notes in his 1996 classic, <em>Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk</em>, the great enabler was the Hindu-Arabic numeral system based on the concept of zero. Put into practical use by minds keen to crack puzzles of random events, it gave people an entirely new outlook on life. ‘The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature,’ he writes, ‘Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.’ From advances in numeracy across the Mediterranean to outcomes of dice rolls recorded by an Italian doctor called Cardano who liked to gamble, and from French theories of probability yielded by an interrupted gamble that got Pascal and Fermat scratching their heads to insurance deals struck at Lloyd’s cafe in London that tracked the odds of trade ships lost at sea, Bernstein’s book offers a fascinating account of how the modern economy drew upon diverse insights to emerge over the past couple of centuries or so.</p>
<p>While the word ‘risk’ itself comes from ‘<em>risicar</em>e’, an Italian verb for ‘to dare’, the dreadfully derivative ‘Modicare’—as distinct from a multi-level marketing company modelled on Amway—that has gained media traction of late is derived directly from ‘Obamacare’, the former US president’s policy to get all American citizens covered by health insurance so that vulnerable folk like the poor and already-ailing would not find themselves locked out of a market where everything’s costly and getting costlier for the reason that the majority don’t have to pay their own bills (and thus feel no pinch), a market with prices more or less at the mercy of a grand bargain of profits shared by insurers and the healthcare industry. Of course, state intervention in any market attracts frowns in capitalist countries, and Obamacare faces a revolt in the US from those who don’t want the burden of other people’s health bills, but social precepts on the wisdom of everyone chipping in a little for the sake of the few struck with ill fortune have been around from time immemorial. Even the Code of Hammurabi that was etched out some 3,800 years ago spoke of compensation for strokes of bad luck. Other artefacts of antiquity found in various river basin zones suggest similar assurances made by the state. So integral has the concept of sharing threats been to civilisation that it’s a wonder that access to healthcare should remain so uneven in the 21st century. Yet, this is not only so, it is appallingly so in India.</p>
<p>Might Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s National Health Protection Scheme be the answer?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Under an ideal system, identity and income would be irrelevant to the ease of getting health services. It should offer access to everyone</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Modi’s insurance scheme, proposed as part of the Union Budget for 2018-19 that goes into effect on April 1st, has attracted popular attention chiefly for being touted as ‘the world’s largest health protection plan’. If it works out, the scale of its coverage alone is expected to qualify it for that distinction. Funded by a Government subsidy, it aims to cover 100 million households—and thus 500 million individuals—that can’t afford to pay their own hospital bills. If that figure isn’t enough to stagger the most sober, what has dropped jaws is the annual limit of the grant: a generous Rs 5 lakh. This matches the coverage of yuppie policyholders, even those who admit themselves to posh hospitals without batting an eyelid. Granting multitudes of have-nots access to private healthcare is clearly part of the whole idea.</p>
<p>True to the Modi Government’s style, the big round figures could also be interpreted as an advertising device for the new scheme. In essence, after all, it’s a repackaged version of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana that ended up in a whimper at least partly because of low enrolment, a failure traceable to high levels of apathy all around. The old Yojana was way too modest to make an impact, say analysts, but now that a far more dramatic proposal has been trumpeted, it’s that much easier for the Niti Aayog and Health Ministry to work something out that could achieve its aim. In its pre-rollout talks with insurers, the Niti Aayog has reportedly asked for the annual family premium to be kept under Rs 1,200. This is an impressively low sum, given that private coverage of Rs 5 lakh usually costs at least twice as much. It would have the advantage of keeping the government subsidy outlay down to just Rs 12,000 crore.</p>
<p>Such a strikingly low fiscal cost would assume the fulfilment of several conditions. First and foremost, it would call for almost full enrolment. As every insurer knows, it takes a vast spread of coverage for health afflictions to attain a low stable rate that allows the actuarial math to be done with accuracy, which in turn is necessary for the general pool of funds to pick up hospital tabs without logging losses. On this, India has always had an edge in theory that has gone wasted in practice all these decades. In recognition of the need for large numbers, the Health Ministry has proposed using eligibility criteria that goes by the database of India’s Socio- Economic Caste Census (SECC) to sign up most rural families, some urban ones dependent on low-wage jobs, and also all those who qualify on at least one of seven specific deprivation parameters. Apart from the insurance cards issued, Aadhaar would likely be the identity proof needed to claim benefits. Whether this approach will open the scheme up to half a billion of the country’s worst off is unclear at this juncture, given the complexity of the exercise and alleged infirmities of the SECC database. Eligibility has not been laid out yet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do private hospitals have what it would take to treat millions more armed with insurance cards? Not right now, but given a few years, demand could attract supply, with fresh facilities sprouting up</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While public participation needs to be maximised, what needs to be minimised is a phenomenon called ‘adverse selection’, a classic problem insurers face in markets where the concept is a novelty. For the healthy multitude to look after the unhealthy few, the former need to sign up <em>en masse</em>, just in case they find themselves among the latter some day. In practice, however, medical insurance tends to attract mainly those with failing health. The rest need persuasion, a task compounded by a peculiarly Indian strain of fatalism that salesfolk say they encounter among have-nots.</p>
<p>Another headache of the business is what insurers call ‘moral hazard’, which refers to the needless use of a facility only because it exists. To take but one example, nearly half of urban India’s hospital births are now Caesarian sections, as surveys report, disproportionately high for the simple reason that health policyholders couldn’t be bothered by the extra cost these surgeries entail. In general, the scope for bill inflation is high in any market where the final cost bearer is not present on the scene and only specialists know what’s going on, but healthcare in India has all but acquired notoriety for it. Hospital regulations do exist, but regulatory scrutiny hardly goes beyond the most glaring cases of malpractice. Aware of how all this could send costs haywire, sources say the Health Ministry is toying with robust infotech systems to monitor and verify claims. As another safeguard, the list of medical interventions approved by the scheme is likely to be rather slim. The fineprint on exclusions may sound like a put-off to some, but analysts don’t see how else it could work without risking budgetary chaos.</p>
<p>THOSE WERE THE ‘ifs’. The big ‘but’ that the scheme is posed with is this: where are the doctors? In terms of overall capacity, the inadequacy of Indian healthcare is so stark that it risks turning into a national neurosis. The stress is apparent in the statistics. According to the Medical Council of India, the country has just over a million allopathic physicians, a ratio of about 0.75 for every 1,000 people, half of China’s and well below the WHO baseline of 1. Unless the dubious services of sundry ayurvedic practitioners are to be relied upon, that count cannot be raised at anything other than an organic pace. The hospital bed ratio isn’t much better. As for the public health network, what exists on the ground is too scanty to serve even as an apology for what exists on paper. Rural India is supposed to be served by a chain of nearly 200,000 primary clinics, but an estimated seven of every ten villagers who fall ill are carted off to the nearest urban centre for private consultation. While the Centre envisages 150,000 Wellness Centres being set up to address that gap, these will only offer basic services. Moreover, with its cover of Rs 5 lakh, the National Health Protection Scheme appears to endorse the country’s mass shift towards private sector care.</p>
<p>Do private hospitals have what it would take to treat millions more armed with insurance cards? Not right now, but given a few years, demand could attract supply, with fresh facilities sprouting up to make the most of a business opportunity. This is not only what the Government expects, it’s what ought to happen.</p>
<p>In the interim, there is reason to suspect that cynicism would need to be fought. For the poor, cashless care is of the essence. If insurer payouts prove too sticky or stingy, private hospitals might resist admitting the scheme’s cardholders. Most operate at full capacity anyway and are known to deny patients admission. Reports say far too many of the old Yojana’s beneficiaries found themselves turned away. In a country riddled with so many exclusion variables that go unstated, attitudinal shifts on identity would have to accompany any effort to open healthcare up to its most needy.</p>
<p>Tales of woe abound. The son of an ironing man who’d tried getting his ailing father into a private clinic in Gurugram last summer tells me he was daunted by the way the reception staff looked his rags up and down. ‘Shame shame, <em>puppy</em> shame,’ he reports, is what their expressions seemed to convey. He slunk away and took his father to a local vaid instead. Aware of Modi’s initiative, he is hopeful of a warmer welcome one day.</p>
<p>Under an ideal system, identity and income would both be irrelevant to the ease of getting health services, which in turn would call for an equal assurance to every individual. It would rid people not just of the need for any access card, but also the approval rigmarole that can get somewhat Kafkaesque even for the better off. For this to be financially feasible, though, both the economic pie and slice allotted by the state to health might need to double. If free treatment is restricted to general ward patients, as the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council Chairman Bibek Debroy suggests, the state may be able to afford a universal system even now.</p>
<p>Either way, open healthcare ought to be the country’s goal. It’s a social instinct that evolved long before money, after all; perhaps even before language.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Nationaltherapy1.jpg?itok=fGE0d98-" /><div>BY: Aresh Shirali</div><div>Node Id: 24105</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 12:00:10 +0000vijayopen24105 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Aadhaar Rajhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/the-aadhaar-raj
<p>IMAGINE A TOOL that enables the equitable distribution of subsidies to all who need it, while at the same time being armoured against fraud. Imagine a tool that enables financial inclusion for all, while being armoured against attempts at tax evasion and money-laundering. Imagine a tool that eases e-commerce and allows for instantaneous transactions on mobile phones.</p>
<p>Now, imagine a tool that enables the Government to track anything and everything that any and every individual does. Also, imagine a tool which lays every user open to multiple forms of identity theft, and cyber impersonation.</p>
<p>The Aadhaar or unique biometric identity was designed and promoted to perform the first set of tasks. But it has run into an endless string of controversies and now faces major constitutional challenges because it also seems to be an excellent tool for mass surveillance and it exposes every individual to the threat of identity theft. What’s more, there is a large and growing body of evidence that the technology doesn’t deliver benefits as advertised.</p>
<p>The concept of a biometric ID system was first explored by Nandan Nilekani in his book, <em>Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century</em>. Nilekani was looking for technocratic solutions to some major problems. Given India’s universal adult franchise and a massive population that lives—or rather survives—below the poverty line, it is a political necessity to dole out food via a Public Distribution System (PDS) to ensure nobody starves to death. There is also a need to hand out subsidised cooking fuel to the same population, if only to ensure that trees are not cut down and indiscriminately burnt. But that PDS is leaky and open to fraud. There are multitudes of fake ration cards in circulation, and people possess multiple subsidised LPG connections. Hence, the Government is defrauded on a regular basis on a massive scale. It also means that subsidised food and gas do not reach the intended beneficiaries.</p>
<p>Another policy problem is financial access. For that, everyone must have bank accounts. But a bank account can only be held by somebody whose identity is verified, with an officially recognised physical address. Or else, easy financial access opens up the financial system to tax fraud and money-laundering.</p>
<p>However, India has large numbers of homeless people who live on the street without verifiable residences. It has multitudes dwelling in slums, squatting in shanties that are not officially recognised as valid addresses by municipalities. And, like any modern economy, India also has migrant labour moving around in search of work. That particular demographic includes the Bihari farm worker who brings in the Punjab harvest; it includes the Bengali diamond-cutter, who spends eleven months of the year in Surat; it includes the Manipuri software engineer, who lives as a paying guest in Bangalore and cannot get a passport.</p>
<p>A unique identity system would, in theory, enable the Government to weed out the duplicate gas connections and ghost ration cards. Such an identity could, on paper, prevent tax-fraud while allowing everyone to access the banking system. Given a unique identity, the address could change but the individual would still be verifiably the same. That would let the Government collect taxes while scholarships, stipends, pensions, gas subsidies, MNREGA payouts and so on could be conveniently and directly transferred to the correct recipients. In addition, that unique identity would allow for easy m-commerce and m-banking, since the number would be verifiable as linked to an individual’s bank account, credit card or mobile wallet. Optimists expect the facility to create a vast field of business opportunity in the years ahead.</p>
<p>Now, how does one give every individual a unique identity? The technocratic solution uses biometric information. Every individual has unique fingerprints and iris patterns. If those prints can be digitally recorded and stored in a database, the identity of a given individual can be verified.</p>
<p>The Aadhaar concept led initially to a turf war between two powerful ministers in the erstwhile UPA Government who respectively controlled Home Affairs and Finance. For a while, there was even a proposal to run two parallel databases with similar biometric data. The task of creating and managing Aadhaar was handed over to a new authority, the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI). This entity was given enormous powers. Complaints about Aadhaar can only be filed with its permission, for instance. It was also given enormous responsibility. It would be the UIDAI’s task to ensure that the data stored would not be leaked in the process of verification.</p>
<p>Leaks could open the system of biometric verification to being gamed and defrauded in ways that are otherwise unimaginable. By duplicating digitally-recorded biometric data, or finding ways to bypass verification, it is possible to impersonate people and set up fake bank accounts, apply for passports, buy ‘burner’ pre-paid mobile subscriptions for criminal and terrorism- related activity, among other things.</p>
<p>If other information is also tied directly to Aadhaar, it can also enable mass surveillance at the click of a mouse. By accessing that one UIDAI silo, it may be possible to learn any individual’s banking and credit history, tax records, place of residence, passport number, cellphone and email ID, medical records, and anything else tied to that number. Any government agency, or any individual, with access to that information could turn the concept of data privacy into a sick joke. Warrant-less mass surveillance using the scheme is also possible.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Optimists expect it to generate new opportunities for business, but with 1.2 billion identities, a failure rate of even 1 per cent could be a nightmare for 12 million people</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, the biometric system has to be absolutely perfect in terms of verifying identities and also thoroughly proofed against breaches and unauthorised access. Even a 1 per cent verification failure rate in either direction amounts to a huge number. In dealing with 1.2 billion people, a failure rate of 1 per cent equals 12 million—more than the population of many countries. ‘Fake positives’, where the UIDAI verifies false biometric data as real, would be dangerous since it would let criminals into the system. On the other hand, ‘fake negatives’, where the system rejects genuine data, would mean people are excluded from subsidies and direct benefit transfers, denied passports and locked out of the financial system. It was unclear until the system was working on a large scale what the technical issues could be in terms of fake positives and negatives and in terms of data security. Surveillance and privacy concerns were raised right from the start. Unfortunately, India doesn’t have a Privacy Law and indeed, the Right to Privacy was not recognised as a Fundamental Right until quite recently in a 2017 judgement.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court tried to limit the use of Aadhaar in a 2013 judgment. It said the identity would not be mandatory but voluntary. It also said that it would be used only in case of direct benefit transfers and subsidies. This meant that those who had other identity documents (passports, driving licenses, PAN and voter cards) could use those for other purposes. Limiting the scope of use would have meant fewer dimensions to the security issues. That order, however, was ignored by the Government. Using the route of a Money Bill to avoid opposition in the Rajya Sabha in 2016, the Government made it mandatory for Aadhaar to be linked to every bank account, telephone number, hospitalisation procedure, birth, death and marriage registration, tax returns, and what have you.</p>
<p>AS A RESULT of mass linkages, multiple organisations now possess sensitive personal data linked to Aadhaar. Some of these databases are held by government institutions, some by private companies. These are pretty large, consisting of hundreds of millions of individuals in the case of mobile service providers and large banks. If any of those bases are insecure, that data may be pushed out into the wild. For example, every bank has a list of account holders, along with credit cards, Aadhaar, PAN, residential addresses, mobile numbers and email IDs. Every mobile service provider has an overlapping but different data set linked to the Aadhaar of subscribers. Hospitals have Aadhaar records of patients linked to medical histories, credit cards, insurance policies and so on.</p>
<p>Each of these databases has been created by verifying Aadhaar through devices that capture and transmit digitised biometric information to be verified by the UIDAI. There are many service providers, using devices to capture and transmit that data. In theory, it is illegal to store that biometric information. In practice, it is very easy to capture and store—all it takes is one rogue employee.</p>
<p>One huge problem is that biometric data cannot be changed, unlike a password. If your fingerprints are stolen and reproduced digitally, you will have a hell of a time proving any fraud that occurs and you will never be fully secure again.</p>
<p>There have already been multiple cases of misuse of Aadhaar data. A prominent telecom company was at the centre of a scandal when mobile subscribers discovered that they had also unknowingly been made account-holders at its payment bank and their gas subsidy payments were being transferred into those accounts. In other instances, criminals have used moulded plastic fingerprints to fool the system after capturing biometric data.</p>
<p>Access to the entire Aadhaar database—all 1.1 billion numbers— was also available for the princely sum of Rs 500 as a Chandigarh-based news daily revealed in an investigative story. Many hackers have exposed flaws in the security. A simple Google search will throw up Aadhaar-linked databases. A stolen cellphone can also be used to change a residential address and set up new bank accounts .</p>
<p>The official response to leaks and security lapses has been generally lackadaisical. In other instances, the UIDAI has simply said the equivalent of ‘Not our fault’. This is cold comfort for somebody whose digital identity has been stolen.</p>
<p>There is also evidence Aadhaar doesn’t efficiently perform the task it is designed for. The failure rate is high. For example, in Aadhaar verification for MNREGA payments in Telangana, the failures averaged 7.8 per cent. The Economic Survey 2016-17 lists multiple cases of states where high failure rates exist. There have been starvation deaths when the Aadhaar system has registered fake negatives and persons below the poverty line have been denied PDS food. Biometric data changes as people age (or if they have an accident), and this leads to a Catch-22 situation. The individual cannot update biometric data because the verification system will reject them. Or, if a provision is created for biometric updating after fake negatives, that facility may be misused to impersonate somebody.</p>
<p>The supposed financial benefits of using Aadhaar may also be overstated. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley , claimed that the Government had saved Rs 15,000 crore by using Aadhaar in the LPG subsidy scheme to weed out ghost connections. Independent analysts suggest the actual gain was closer to Rs 120 crore. Jaitley was apparently including savings resulting from the efforts of oil-marketing companies to eliminate ghost LPG accounts before Aadhaar was introduced. The RBI also released a study that suggested that its savings were ‘mixed’.</p>
<p>I have avoided using statistics as far as possible because there are points of principle involved. Even a few starvation deaths due to fake negatives calls into question the entire policy of using Aadhaar for transferring benefits and subsidies. Even one citizen put under warrantless surveillance calls into question the tool that enables such surveillance. The scheme covers every resident of India (including non-citizens) and employs an army of operators and data-entry clerical staff. The database is accessed by thousands of organisations for a multitude of purposes. There are multiple partial copies of the database in the possession of many offices. India doesn’t have a privacy and data privacy law. Common sense suggests that it is impossible to guarantee data security under those circumstances.</p>
<p>So why is the Government so insistent on the project? Partly due to sunk costs. Much money and political capital has already been spent. It may possibly serve as a surveillance tool too. The Supreme Court is currently hearing multiple petitions related to Aadhaar and its privacy and security concerns. The deadline for mandatory linking to bank accounts, mobiles, etcetera, has been extended until the Court makes a judgment. One can only hope that it will find a way to safeguard the fundamental rights of citizens.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/AadhaarRaj1.jpg?itok=i25xzzao" /><div>BY: Devangshu Datta</div><div>Node Id: 24104</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 11:50:38 +0000vijayopen24104 at http://www.openthemagazine.comCryptocurrency: Coin Your Futurehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/cryptocurrency-coin-your-future
<p>THE BENGALURU- based startup Drivezy has an interesting idea. The company envisages a time in India when people, at least a large majority of them, will not buy cars. They will instead share them. “Just think about it,” says its co-founder Ashwarya Pratap Singh. “A car spends a majority of its lifetime unused in a garage. Add increasing maintenance and fuel charges, and the vehicle’s depreciating value. It makes no sense.” There are other reasons too, according to Singh, which make sharing vehicles more attractive. The disparity in income levels in India means a large section cannot afford to buy vehicles. And among those who do have the money, the attitudes of the so-called millennials are different: like their counterparts elsewhere in the world, Singh says, they prefer shared access over car ownership.</p>
<p>What Drivezy offers as a solution is a platform that connects owners of vehicles and motorbikes to those looking to rent one for an hour or longer. The owner thus monetises the time his vehicle would have spent idle and losing value. The renter gains access to a vehicle strictly for the time he needs it, instead of having to hail a cab or have a vehicle of his own. Drivezy started as JustRide in Mumbai in 2015 with eight cars and has expanded to about 1,600 automobiles and 800 bikes in six cities now. Next month will see the service reach the National Capital Region and Hyderabad, says Singh.</p>
<p>The sustainability of the project, however, depends on the availability of a large number of such vehicles. It is a supply-intensive business, Singh says. To give it a fillip, Drivezy came up with a plan last year to buy its own fleet of vehicles that could be put up for rent. The founders estimated a budget of around $20 million for this.</p>
<p>In many ways, Drivezy is like a conventional technology startup. Not only does it address a problem in a novel way, question old wisdom and make use of modern technology, it has an engaging origin story. Singh’s brand new Ford Figo, which he shared with his flat-mates, got so badly damaged in an accident several years ago that he realised it made more sense to rent a vehicle instead. It also aims, like all startups do, to be ‘disruptive’.</p>
<p>But the real novelty of Drivezy is how it raises funds for the business. In the past, it was taking the usual route, with $16 million got from four rounds of Venture Capitalist funding. Earlier this year, however, for one-fourth of the $20 million it needs, it made an ‘Initial Coin Offer’, an ICO, on the internet. Another round is on its way.</p>
<p>An ICO is like a public offer, except that what’s on offer here is not an equity share but a digital coin or cryptographic token by which the subscriber can typically avail of the issuer’s services in the future (or some other benefit). The coins can also be traded on the internet, so it’s not necessarily potential customers but investors who are expected to subscribe to the issue. The ICO, after all, is an offshoot of the cryptocurrency idea, and the coins issued are expected to gain in exchange value once the business takes off and demand rises. Of course, if it fails, the value of the coins crash.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A digital coin issue is a way of raising capital without the hassle of meeting regulatory measures. It calls for neither collateral to be stumped up nor dilution of the firm's ownership</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Conceptually, it is another form of crowd-funding. As some have put it, investing in ICOs is a bit like buying tickets to a movie from a filmmaker who promises to use the funds to make the film.</p>
<p>It is an easy way of raising capital without the hassle of meeting regulatory requirements for classic debt or equity funds. It calls for neither collateral to be stumped up nor dilution of the firm’s ownership. The proposal, however, needs to carry conviction with investors, who need to be assured of the project’s potential and the authenticity of the coins (enabled by encryption technology). The dream scenario for investors is that they’ll have the next Bitcoin if the business succeeds.</p>
<p>It is a risky proposition for investors, no doubt. For what they are really doing is placing their trust in an idea that may or may not get anywhere. But high risk is what investors looking for high returns are willing to take, and with an attractive pitch, a punchy website, some hype and clever marketing, it seems any startup can raise money this way.</p>
<p>Aditya Chavan, co-founder of another startup, Machaao, which is in the process of making a coin offer in April, believes the ICO model will redefine funding. He compares this moment to the early years of internet penetration. “The internet changed everything, right? It led to Amazon and what not. In the next five years, this is going to be the way all companies will raise money,” he predicts.</p>
<p>Globally, ICOs have caught on. Last year, 210 ICOs raised around $3.9 billion around the world, according to Coinschedule, an ICO listing platform and data provider, compared to $95 million by around 45 companies the year before. This year, despite the cryptocurrency crash that has raised some doubt over their survival in the formal economy, 88 companies have already raised $3.4 billion. Telegram, the messaging service registered in the British Virgin Islands, is in the midst of the world’s biggest ICO ever. According to <em>Bloomberg</em>, it expects to raise over $2.5 billion in three rounds of funding.</p>
<p>That’s a well-known service, though. Most coin offerers are not. Singh admits that most ICOs in the market right now are scams. “They have little paperwork in place, little idea about rules and regulations. It’s just an idea. And people are all going to lose money [on them],” he says. “In our case, however, we have a clear plan and a working model already.”</p>
<p>To raise $5 million earlier this year, Drivezy offered 12.5 million tokens called Rentalcoins, which entitle owners to a share of the firm’s monthly revenues; for the next round, it plans to issue 36 million more of these. Investors buy these coins by using a popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. In a later phase of expansion, Drivezy hopes to launch Rentalcoins 2.0, expected to raise $100 million, which could be used to avail of its services. The company is currently tying up with several others across the world to provide sharing services. Further, the company hopes that Rentalcoins 2.0 will come to act as currency for a variety of other services offered by any firm ready to accept them as payment. In Singh’s words, “It is designed to work as a common economic system which can be used by any organisation operating within the sharing economy.” Owners of the earlier coins will be allowed to convert them into Rentalcoins 2.0 as well, in accordance with the company’s terms. To back its coins up with hard assets, in a sense, Drivezy offers coin-holders the option of encashing their holding: they would get the proportional resale value of its vehicles. “There is some apprehension about ICOs right now—their legality, about scams,” says Singh, “But we are doing it solidly, consulting lawyers and putting all the paperwork together.” The basic business, he claims, is already a success.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To raise $5 million earlier this year, Bengaluru-based startup Drivezy offered 12.5 million rentalcoins, which entitle owners to a share of the firm's monthly revenues</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Proponents of this new means of raising money argue that while the concept may lend itself to fraud, ICOs represent a move towards financial security in the startup ecosystem. They base their argument on the logic of a common cause. Founders and coin holders, they say, are stakeholders with an interest in ensuring the venture’s success and seeing the value of the coins rise. They also see the idea creating the space for a disruptive company to emerge and challenge the current technology giants of the world.</p>
<p>Some of that sounds over-optimistic, but what cannot be denied is that there is a scramble among investors right now to spot the Next Big Thing. Since large sums of money in recent years have been made from a mere scrap of an idea, even from what began as a joke, anything that could possibly hit the jackpot has a good chance of attracting them. Stories of cryptocurrency wealth have played a role in the ongoing frenzy. One digital coin, called Useless Ethereum Token (or UET), whose logo is a raised middle finger and which is described by its developer as, ‘The world’s first 100% honest Ethereum ICO. No value, no security, and no product. Just me, spending your money’, managed to raise $40,000 in its ICO last year. Asked to comment by <em>The New York Observer</em>, the anonymous developer reportedly said, “I realised that people didn’t really care about the product. They cared about spending a little bit of money, watching a chart and then withdrawing a little bit more money. So why not have an ICO without a product, and do so completely transparently just to see what happened?”</p>
<p>In the West, celebrity endorsements have begun. Last year, the boxer Floyd Mayweather wrote on Instagram, ‘I’M GONNA make a $hit t$n of money on August 2nd on the Stox.com ICO’. The company, an online prediction market platform, went on to raise more than $30 million. Others like Paris Hilton have also backed ICOs. Nothing whets the appetite for risk, it seems, than seeing others get rich quick.</p>
<p>Inevitably, regulators across the world are beginning to scrutinise the ICO model. China and South Korea have already banned it. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has issued guidelines on which tokens need to be classified as a ‘security’, subject to its rules and registration requirements. India so far has only taken note of cryptocurrencies, with a mention of them in the Finance Minister’s Budget speech outlining the Government’s general stance on them. They are not considered legal tender, he said, and the authorities would take appropriate measures to eliminate the use of crypto- assets in the financing of illegitimate activities. As a result of the ambiguity on the legality of ICOs in India, some startups conduct their ICOs by registering them in foreign countries (or they bar people of some nationalities). Drivezy’s ICO, for instance, barred Indian and Chinese citizens from subscribing.</p>
<p>Machaao, set up by five founders, two of them in Mumbai and the rest in the US, is a bot service on Facebook Messenger that focuses on cricket. It plans to expand to other sports later. The company claims to have more than 800,000 users, most of them in India, and the rest in other countries of the Subcontinent who are sent customised notifications and updates on the game. “Let’s assume, for instance, that there is an 18-year-old-girl who does not follow Test cricket but is a fan of Virat Kohli,” says Chavan. “So she can customise Ganglia (the service’s cricket bot) in such a way that she gets to know every time Kohli comes out to bat… and she can even get updates.” The platform also offers ‘Challenges’, a live prediction game where participants guess the outcome of a cricket match every few overs.</p>
<p>Machaao’s digital currency is called mTiME, of which it proposes to sell 500 million in three rounds of an ICO, priced in terms of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, US dollars and Indian rupees. “What we are trying to do is kickstart [this part of the online] economy,” Chavan says. “The idea basically is that fans spend a lot of time following a game. And various platforms generate wealth from this activity of fans. But fans don’t get anything in return for the time put in. So we want to change that.” The plan is to reward ‘second screen communities’, or those following the game on Machaao’s platform, “based on monetised time as a store of value.”</p>
<p>Machaao’s tokens, Chavan says, could be used to consume new types of content on the platform: live feeds of a game in progress, for example. Or users could hold their own ‘challenges’ involving mTiME tokens, which the company claims are not ‘chance based’ (and thus not a form of gambling), since they take skill to win. What the company gains is a 10-per cent slice as a ‘processing fee’. Of course, these coins will be tradable, like other cryptocurrencies.</p>
<p>In general, most coins minted on the promise of a business model are likely to vanish in thin air, given that startups themselves have such a high failure rate. New cryptocurrencies too are a dime a dozen on the internet these days, thanks to last year’s Bitcoin boom (a concept that has many fans in spite of its recent slide). As with many other businesses, only the rare success will survive to thrive. But the ICO as a funding model, Singh believes, is here to stay. “I think in the future,” he says, “this is going to be the way all companies will raise money.”</p>
<p>Companies making coin offers have an interest in overstating the wonders of the concept. But how they fare will be watched closely. The traditional world of finance may be too stodgy to admit it, but it needs new ideas to shake it up.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Coinyourfuture1.jpg?itok=9KLYvLng" /><div>BY: Lhendup G Bhutia</div><div>Node Id: 24103</div>Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:31:12 +0000vijayopen24103 at http://www.openthemagazine.comWhat Homebodies Watch: Net Fixhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/what-homebodies-watch-net-fix
<p>IN 1957, WHEN Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka reinvented the radio by creating a pocket-sized version, little did they realise that they were starting a revolution in personal entertainment that would carry on unabated 60 years hence. Their company, which came to be known as Sony, continued to innovate along those lines by giving us the Walkman, the Discman and also the world’s first fully transistorised Trinitron TV set. While Sony did not invent any of these technologies, it was highly successful in packaging them in a form that consumers never imagined they needed. Other than a live theatre experience, every other form of entertainment can now be personalised. What developed over centuries as a community experience is being redeveloped today as a bespoke engagement of every individual. How Indians are entertained is undergoing a profound shift. Much of it got a boost with the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of the multipurpose screen in each of our pockets that many call the ‘smartphone’.</p>
<p>Consider the way it has altered our lives. While my daughter Aditi has always been a lot more judicious about her school work, my son Arnab has always required some supervision. In that effort, his homework time was set for an hour every day, starting 5 pm — after which he was allowed an hour of TV before he went out to play. But as he moved to higher classes, homework got a bit more demanding. Some days, it would take an hour to finish and on others, maybe 57, 68 or even 71 minutes. This meant appointment viewing of his favourite TV shows was no longer an option. Without much prompting, he switched to video-on-demand, and it no longer mattered exactly when he finished school tasks. Nor did network schedules; last year, we cancelled the cable subscription to the TV in his room. My then 12-year-old had officially ‘cut the cord’. This is not unique at all. Everyone below the age of 17 no longer knows what a non-interactive screen is. There is no reason for Generation Z to return to scheduled TV, unless it’s playing a live event of significance. Cord-cutting has caught the fancy of older generations too. It has been happening globally since 2010 in every household that can afford a decent internet connection. The rate at which consumers are dropping their cable and satellite TV packages hit its highest level ever in the fourth quarter of 2017. Vast numbers will never subscribe to cable TV. In countries blessed with better broadband connectivity, such as South Korea, Japan, Singapore and parts of Europe, cable companies are in crisis. Internet and video streaming technologies have spelt doom for cable company stocks. India is on the cusp of that revolution too—except that it is going to be driven by mobile broadband connectivity. Reliance’s Jio broke the mould by providing affordable data, with market forces drawing Airtel and Vodafone to follow suit. Given such large data allowances, mobile users have begun to download the biggest files of the computer world: digital video. While 4G reach and quality of service still have gaps, the ball in India is clearly rolling that way.</p>
<p>Stockmarkets capture the shift. The market capitalisation of 94-year-old Walt Disney Inc stands at $154 billion, whereas that of the relative infant Netflix is only a shade lower, at $138 billion. So, what’s special about Netflix? The economic power of direct reach. Traditional entertainment giants are essentially B2B firms, Business-to-Business: a TV show producer’s customer is a TV network; a network’s customer is a cable carrier. Likewise, a movie producer’s customer is a movie distributor, whose customer is a theatre chain. Unless such a company is fully integrated end-to- end, it has no interface with the actual consumer, let alone the means to collect money directly. A telecom company, in contrast, is B2C, Business-to-Consumer. It offers services and draws money directly without the involvement of third parties, and often even before the delivery of content.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Stockmarkets capture the shift. The market capitalisation of 94-year-old Walt Disney Inc stands at $154 billion, whereas that of the relative infant Netflix is only a shade lower, at $138 billion</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Till a couple of years ago, most traditional entertainment companies didn’t invest adequate time or effort in a direct consumer relationship. Enter companies like Amazon, Netflix and others, and they managed to get average-revenues-per-user many times higher than even the largest TV networks. This direct connect has helped Netflix grow from a small distributor of DVDs by mail into a content company with production budgets that put the big studios to shame, altering the economics of showbiz like little else ever before. Its original titles are now winning some of the most prestigious awards. With eight Academy Award nominations this year and its first full-length feature Oscar for <em>Icarus</em>, it is now more than a commercial force to be reckoned with. Amazon Prime Video had already achieved that distinction with a Best Picture nomination last year for <em>Manchester by the Sea</em>. In India, too, the two global rivals are making the most of their direct advantage. Consider Netflix’s success with <em>Love Per Square Foot</em>, an Indian film created by my former boss Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP. In the kids’ TV space, Netflix has ordered <em>Mighty Little Bheem</em>, an original production by Rajeev Chilaka’s Green Gold Animation. Amazon has also signed up material from Zoya Akhtar and several others. Already on Indian mobile phone screens are apps like Balaji’s Alt and Zee5, among others, which are also planning originals to play the same game. Where the entertainment bucks go, content gathers. And vice-versa.</p>
<p>Netflix went past 110 million subscribers in 2017, and with its recent increase in subscription fees, it has delivered its first profitable financial year. Many forecast that it will peak at 400 million subscribers or more. Till then, it is expected to remain a well-run company that produces content loved by consumers and critics alike. Meanwhile, players like Disney are not going to sit pretty watching new apps take over the cord-cutting generation. Traditional firms whose financial performance had been driven all these years by legacy cable bundling are responding to the threat. Disney has just announced a reorganisation of the company into four segments, which include a new direct-to-consumer division to house its portfolio of streaming video businesses. This will include the ESPN+ sports streaming service and a yet-to-be- named general entertainment service slated for a late 2019 launch. It also helps that Disney’s recent acquisition of Fox hands it a majority stake in Hulu, one of the early entrants into this business. Fox+, an online service, would be part of its new thrust. Viacom too has hinted of a streaming service that will supply content from <em>MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon</em> and others. The company has already taken baby steps in some markets through its Voot service, a video-on-demand (VOD) version of <em>Nickelodeon</em>, and also an investment in newcomer Philo.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If hotstar's 67 subscribers were to pay 499 per year, the fee Amazon charges in India, it would have Rs 3,300 crore, which could buy 10 of the year's biggest Hindi movies for exclusive streaming</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Traditional content companies are not the only ones trying to reach out over the internet. In fact, the world’s most currently prominent—if not the largest—have had their beginnings within technology companies. In June 2016, Apple took the initiative to form a TV unit by hiring executives to oversee all aspects of worldwide video programming. Since then, it has hired executives for international, comedy and children’s shows, plus much more. Google’s YouTube platform also has ambitious plans. Between Apple and Google alone, they have an installed base of over 2.5 billion delivery devices in the world’s pockets. YouTube Red, a subscription service, is spending up to $1 million per episode on shows featuring Ellen DeGeneres and influencers like Rhett & Link. Facebook has introduced its ‘Watch’ tab that has rolled out several dozen original shows. Even bit players like Singtel owned HOOQ are trying to grab regional markets through its many subsidiary telecom firms’ customers bases. India’s Jio has been buying content and investing in content production at a frenetic pace as well. All this can only mean more choice for the consumer.</p>
<p>Is there space for more VOD or streaming services? Absolutely. When TV first entered our living rooms, we were only served by a few channels. But that number multiplied over the decades. Pay TV today serves every single niche that one can possibly imagine, including specific language markets, regional markets, communities, special interest groups, religious groups and more. VOD in its current form is nowhere close to that reach. While in India players like Hotstar, Zee5, Alt Balaji, Sun Nxt and others have started to cater to previously unserved demand niches for VOD content, most emerging markets in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America still have little to choose from. Technology limitations and lack of access to unlimited data have also left large vacuums in the potential market. Innovation in business models and delivery systems will slowly fill this vacuum and soon there will be newer impactful services that will send content to everyone’s very own screen.</p>
<p>Direct delivery to people’s fingertips will almost certainly reshape India’s TV and film industries. The economics of it suggests so. Consider Hotstar, with its 67 million subscribers; if they were to pay Rs 499 per year, Amazon’s India pricing, it would amount to Rs 3,300 crore, a sum that would easily buy 10 of Hindi cinema’s biggest movies in a year (box office collections inclusive) for exclusive streaming. Now consider the fact that its market potential is at least ten times 67 million, and the financial heft of a successful digital service becomes apparent.</p>
<p>Older forms of delivery are mass media vehicles. Individual users had little choice in when and what content they can watch because their services are in a one-size-fits-all format. Internet-enabled smart screens have transformed the ease of access dramatically. What hasn’t changed, however, is the human need to sit back, relax and watch a nice entertaining story. Individual reach will ensure that what we watch is more personalised than it is now. I look forward to bigger and bolder shows at my fingertips. Content will also see other innovations and will try to deliver an even more immersive experience. Gamified children’s content is already being experimented with. The Singapore-based game hardware company Razer has introduced a mobile phone that offers true-to-life cinematic audio, using Dolby Atmos technologies. Meanwhile, our device screens are getting more sophisticated and are offering human vision-like picture quality. Although it’s impossible to foresee what level these devices reach, we know for sure that we will spend more late nights binge-watching our favourite shows and blaming the ‘wretched traffic’ for our late arrival to work the next morning.</p>
<p>My content company’s biggest share of revenues still comes from the global pay TV business. The recent shift in the environment has prompted pay TV firms to invest in better and bolder content. This is the only way for them to maintain their relevance while they steer towards digital delivery. Personally, though, I had cut the cord many years back. I can’t remember the last time I watched a scheduled TV show, except the occasional grand slam tennis match. I won’t consider snapping off my VOD subscriptions because it offers unparalleled value-for-the-dollar and continues to entertain me with new content every month.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Netflix.jpg?itok=tb669ryA" /><div>BY: Jyotirmoy Saha</div><div>Node Id: 24102</div>Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:38:38 +0000vijayopen24102 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Kohli Rate of Growthhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/the-kohli-rate-of-growth
<p>IN THE BOOK <em>Soccernomics</em>, a crash-course into viewing a global sport through the prism of economics, authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, a football journalist and an economist, respectively, expend a fair amount of pages on the penalty kick. Of course they do, given, ‘a surprising number of economists have thought hard about the humble penalty kick… even Steve Levitt, winner of perhaps the most important prize in economics, the Clark Medal (which some insiders think outranks the Nobel)’.</p>
<p>But the chapter doesn’t instantly jump into how the simple spot-kick illuminated research into game theory, which in turn helped the American government predict and plot against Soviet moves during the Cold War. It begins with John Terry, Chelsea’s legendary defender and captain, missing a penalty against Manchester United in Moscow in 2008 that left his side inches short of club-football’s most coveted trophy, the UEFA Champions League. In popular culture, Terry’s small miss (the ball smacked the post) has had big repercussions: it is widely regarded as the club- equivalent of Roberto Baggio’s shank for Italy in the World Cup final of 1994.</p>
<p>‘We now know that a Basque economist told Chelsea that Edwin Van der Sar (Manchester United’s goalie) tended to dive right against right-footed kickers,’ write Kuper and Szymanski. ‘Van der Sar did indeed dive right, as the Basque economist had foreseen, but Terry slipped on the wet grass, and his shot into the left-hand corner missed by inches.’ It cost Chelsea the trophy but according to the economists in the book: ‘By one estimate, Terry’s penalty cost Chelsea $170 million.’</p>
<p>Fans, however, will tell you that the real cost of Terry’s miss was neither the silverware nor the money; it was the lifelong scar that that moment left on the 25.6 million loyalists Chelsea had worldwide in 2008 (data from Sport+Markt).</p>
<p>That is quite a figure. Yet, it doesn’t hold a candle to the number of TV viewers an international cricket match involving the Indian team generates, a number that only balloons further if that match happens to be a World Cup fixture. When India played Pakistan in the semi-final of the 50-over World Cup in India back in 2011, 495 million individuals tuned in. Which, then, begs the question: What is the real cost of an India loss in a match of consequence? Is it the crores lost in revenue? Or is it the half-a-billion broken hearts?</p>
<p>Cricket, unlike football, does not have anything as diabolical as penalties in its game play. But it does have a run chase and every single cricket match ends in one. In a match limited to 50 overs per side—just the right limit for each of the 300 balls to feel at a premium and the target daunting enough for each of the 11 batsmen to saddle a share of the burden—a run chase can often sustain the unnerving pulse of a penalty shootout for close to three hours. Couple that with the parameters of situation and stage, and the ODI run chase is an economist’s dream; a dream that involves metrics deeper than just overs left, wickets in hand and required run rate.</p>
<p>In the summer of 2003, with all these ingredients in place at the World Cup final in Johannesburg, the Indian team experienced its own Terry moment—a jolt that rankled among, conservatively speaking, 250 million fans in India, or 10 times the quantity of Chelsea’s worldwide fans. And unlike Chelsea, the Indian dressing room did not have an economist at its disposal to work out an endgame. But they did have Sachin Tendulkar, the most calculative cricket brain the world had seen yet.</p>
<p>At the Wanderers, after India captain Sourav Ganguly had put Australia in to bat, Ricky Ponting’s unbeaten 140 helped his side to 359 runs—the most runs ever scored in a World Cup final. When Tendulkar noticed the long faces and drooping shoulders of his teammates during the innings break, he delivered a speech that was an education in the fundamentals of economics: the scarcity of a key resource and how best to optimise its use in achieving a goal. “If we aim to hit one boundary every over, just one, then we would have scored 200 runs in 50 balls,” Tendulkar’s fabled pep-talk went. “If we do that successfully, only 160 runs will be left, with 250 balls in hand.”</p>
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<p>Thanks to his phenomenal rate of success, Virat Kohli's brain began attracting the analysis of economists, mathematicians and statisticians</p>
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<p>Tendulkar put his theory to test in the very first over. Fourth ball, he pulled Glenn McGrath through midwicket for a boundary. But then, the very next ball, as Tendulkar looked to repeat the feat, he top-edged a pull, was caught and bowled by the bowler. India folded soon after. In a recent interview with this magazine, Ganguly revealed that this loss remains “the greatest regret” of his life.</p>
<p>Many years later, in a round-table conversation with McGrath in New Delhi, the Australian fast bowler was informed of Tendulkar’s dressing room talk. McGrath pressed his lips together to show that he was impressed, only to wink and add: “But it really didn’t work now, did it?” McGrath, like many old timers in cricket, resisted data and was under the impression that number-crunching had no place in practice, especially during the inevitability that is a run-chase in a big game. And to be fair to him, McGrath’s audience that day readily agreed. Until, that is, Tendulkar’s heir-apparent, Virat Kohli, showed up.</p>
<p>Fond of ‘calculations on a cricket field’, as he put it in a recent interview, Kohli has redefined the way both cricketers and analysts approach the second innings of a cricket match. It will be fair to say that no other batsman in the history of the game has approached targets quite as clinically as Kohli does and thanks to his phenomenal rate of success, his brain began attracting the analysis of economists, mathematicians and statisticians. And, in one case, even a cosmologist.</p>
<p>WHEN SOCCCERNOMICS was published, Kuper was asked by the<em> New York Times</em> just why he put himself through the arduous task of explaining a game through the lens of economics, to which he answered: “The heart of the matter is that thinking in soccer is outdated, backward and tradition based. It needs a fresh look based on data.” Himanish Ganjoo, a Delhi-based cosmologist, echoes Kuper’s sentiments when he says: “I got into data because as a cricket fan, I found it appalling that stats in the game didn’t include context.”</p>
<p>Ganjoo was used to crunching astronomical banks of numbers—he simulates large-scale distribution of dark matter across the universe for a living. That bent of mind, then, came in handy when he decided to simulate the distribution of matter across the smaller but largely untouched landscape of cricket. “More than most other global sports, cricket is a stats-oriented game,” Ganjoo says. “But I found it disconcerting that despite the large wealth of numbers, most of the analysis done was rudimentary.”</p>
<p>Which is another way of saying that everyone knows Virat Kohli revels in run chases. And that out of his 35 ODI centuries (second only to Tendulkar on the all-time list) thus far, 21 Kohli tons have been struck with India hunting down a total. Or that 19 of those 21 hundreds were scored in winning causes. These numbers— figures representative of a winning Indian team—have kept sponsors and broadcasters agog. Last year, Oppo spent Rs 1,079 crore to be India’s title shirt sponsor, and Star Sports broke the bank with Rs 16,347.5 crore for exclusive media rights to the IPL for the next five years.</p>
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<p>The big wheel of Indian cricket turns on the nuts and bolts of numbers and performances—both largely produced by Kohli these days</p>
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<p>The big wheel of Indian cricket turns on the nuts and bolts of numbers and performances—both largely produced by Kohli these days—so Ganjoo decided to see just what India’s star batsman does right to keep the economics of the game ticking. “I was more interested in how Kohli scored those runs. What made him score those runs. And why he has become the greatest run chaser we have ever seen,” he says. He built his database from scratch, learnt to code, and constructed his own metrics to get some in-depth answers.</p>
<p>To understand Kohli, Ganjoo approached his vast reservoir of numbers as an economist would, reading heavily into how the batsman makes use of the most significant finite resource at his disposal during a chase—deliveries. His findings are laid bare on his computer monitor, crunched by the Python programming language, and in the form of graphs and numbers on an Excel sheet. “To start things off, I found out his balls-per-dismissal—or the deliveries version of his batting average in run chases,” he says, “How many balls does he face on average between dismissals when India is batting second?” The spreadsheet says Kohli gets out once in 71.1 balls, fourth on the list after Michael Bevan (83.6), Sunil Gavaskar (79.5) and Gordon Greenidge (75.7). “Now this is a remarkable achievement for Kohli, given that Bevan was a lower-order finisher and stayed not out a lot and both Gavaskar and Greenidge were openers so they of course had more balls to face. For a batsman who has batted predominantly between No 3 and No 6, Kohli is the only one up there.”</p>
<p>The next metric is balls-per-innings, or how many balls on average Kohli consumes in a run-chase: 53.9 balls. Doesn’t sound like a lot? Here’s some perspective. Kohli is fifth on this list (behind four openers, Gavaskar, Greenidge, Geoff Marsh and Kepler Wessels but at a far superior strike-rate to any of them) and way ahead of every other ODI legend—39 places above Brian Lara (44.2), 43 places ahead of Ricky Ponting (43.4) and 48 spots above Tendulkar (42.4). Says Ganjoo: “These two indicators reveal to us that Kohli likes to spend more time at the crease in pressure situations than any of the other greats, so the next obvious question is: what does he do with that time at the crease?”</p>
<p>For one, it is common knowledge that Kohli likes to run a lot—singles, doubles and triples—pushing his batting partners to the point of exhaustion. As Kohli transformed physically from fat to fit to freak, his mental approach to the game metamorphosed too, as Kohli shelved rope-clearing hits for hard bursts across the 22-yard strip. Can this strategic change be tracked on the spreadsheet? “Sure,” says Ganjoo. “During ODI chases, Kohli has scored more non- boundary runs on average than any other player in the history of the game. He is No 1 here, with an absolute number of 26.9 non- boundary runs per game.” On this indicator, his ‘greatest of their era’ predecessors, Tendulkar and Viv Richards, are positioned 48th and 49th respectively.</p>
<p>But Kohli’s reputation for being the game’s finest run-hunter isn’t based solely on him being able to physically out-run his competition. What makes him truly unique is that he likes to smack swift and safe grass-hugging fours as well. Only his Delhi-mate Shikhar Dhawan hits more boundaries on average (5.9 per game) in ODI run chases than Kohli (5.6). So when Kohli’s boundaries per innings (BPI) and non-boundary runs per innings (NBRPI) are plotted on the X and Y axes of a graph respectively, Kohli’s data point threatens to tear out of the two-dimensional surface— placed at the diametrically opposite end of the origin, many logarithmic miles away from anyone else who has played the game.</p>
<p>That’s not just it. While only scratching the surface of his research, Ganjoo points out in one-day run chases, Kohli scores an average of 25.5 per cent of the required runs (third on the all-time list)— for any player who bats in the top 4, that is, a parameter placed to weed out players in the lower order who score a bigger chunk of the remaining runs at the fag end of the game—from when he walks in to bat, suggestive of his ability to dominate the attack. Also, from the moment Kohli walks in to bat in a chase to when he is dismissed, the team accounts on average for 40 per cent of the chase runs (third on the all-time list), which highlights his ability to forge partnerships.</p>
<p>“To really understand Kohli and the game as it is played today,” says Ganjoo, “one cannot continue to ignore the principles of economics. The more we apply it, the deeper our idea of what is unfolding on the field. Baseball, for example, understood this concept very early and it has changed not just the fan’s approach to the sport but the way the game is played itself.” He’s right. Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane applied micro-economics to change his club’s fortunes and the way the game is played in America today, a story that found global appeal thanks to Michael Lewis’ book <em>Moneyball</em> (later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt).</p>
<p>In the book, Beane says ‘winning is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability’. Kohli perhaps works out these odds instinctively. But only via data, vast swathes of it, do we get to enter his calculative mind and witness what he does and how he does it.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Viratkholi.jpg?itok=Tf32am1h" /><div>BY: Aditya Iyer</div><div>Node Id: 24101</div>Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:26:58 +0000vijayopen24101 at http://www.openthemagazine.comLike Clockwork: The Market Value of Timehttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/openomics-2018/like-clockwork-the-market-value-of-time
<p>IN JANUARY 2017, Prateek Kumar, then 42, was assigned an infotech project in Hyderabad. It required him to travel to the city once or twice a week from his home in Bengaluru. Despite having been a software consultant for nearly 15 years, this was the first time he had taken on an outstation offer. A couple of months into the job, Kumar had three new entrants to his life, a life he once used to describe to his friends as “extraordinarily peaceful”—a marriage counsellor, a spinal therapist and a hypertension specialist. He initially attributed the stress he was perpetually feeling to the change in his work routine. But he soon came to realise that it wasn’t work that was the culprit, it was time. The six-hour commute from home to office was leaving him with very little time for himself, and sometimes even for his work. “The whole purpose of going to Hyderabad was getting defeated because I kept arriving late for meetings or I would be too tired to complete the needful assignments,” says Kumar. In May 2017, Kumar decided he didn’t need people to guide his health and personal life, what he really needed was someone to manage his time.</p>
<p>“We have all heard the excuse, ‘I don’t have enough time for this.’ When my marriage and health began to fall apart, I decided I wanted to make time,” says Kumar. The first thing that his time manager, Anushri Goel—a management graduate from Pune and now a time consultant—did was convince Kumar to invest Rs 4,000 a week on a seat in the Heli-taxi service from Bengaluru IT City to the airport. The commute that once took Kumar two hours was now done in 15 minutes. Goel also made Kumar cut short his bathing time from 40 minutes to 15, eat one meal on-the-go while reading the newspaper alongside, subscribe to app-based taxi services instead of his local taxi (which always arrived late), and buy a new pair of formal shoes.</p>
<p>“Managing time effectively isn’t simply about scheduling tasks differently. It’s also about finding what it is that’s slowing you down—the bits and pieces of your life that can be improved to speed things up. I realised after a few weeks of working with Kumar sir that no matter what time you asked him to arrive, even if the car reached on time, he would be late because he used to walk terribly slowly. I then realised that his shoes were incredibly tight for him. It might sound trivial that a change of shoes can make a significant change in someone’s life, but guess what, in our rushed lives, every second counts,” explains Goel, 38. The time he saved every day, Kumar invested in 10-minute pilates workouts, 12-minute breathing exercises and 15-minute conversations with his wife. Within four months, he no longer needed any help with his marriage, spine or blood pressure.</p>
<p>With ever-increasing urban congestion, new social demands and a blurring of boundaries between private and professional lives, time is no longer just money for Indians. It is now one of our most fiercely protected and valuable resources, the scarcity of which is calling for new responses. Lack of time is one of the most widely cited reasons for failing relationships, poor health, faltering work output, low interest in hobbies and civil awareness and even poor self-esteem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of community service. It is no longer money, food or clothing that charities now request; it is time.</p>
<p>According to economic literature on time, there are three broad activity categories on which time can be spent, each fundamentally different from the other: time for personal care activities; time for economic activities, education and care of household; and time for leisure. Some economists argue that finding the right balance of time to invest in all three could hold the key to long-term satisfaction and an improved quality of life.</p>
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<p>Lack of time is one of the most widely cited reasons for failing relationships, poor health, faltering work output, low interest in hobbies and even poor self-esteem</p>
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<p>Writes Nicoleta Caragea, a social researcher and academic based in Romania, in her paper <em>Time Allocation in Economics and the Implications for Economic Development</em>: ‘Due to [its] characteristics— scarcity and irreversibility—time could be regarded as [having] an important economic value… The recent economic theory considers time not only as an accumulation of moments or a benchmark between two or more events in time, but a production factor, like labour or capital. These theories start with the premise that time is a scarce resource; therefore, a central question is the optimal allocation. Also, time spent outside work arrangements has a significant economic value, both at micro (individual, household, or firm) and macroeconomic (national economy) level.’ Others have had similar conclusions.</p>
<p>Christopher C Klein, an economist at Middle Tennessee State University, notes the importance of effective time allocation in his paper, <em>The Economics of Time as a Resource</em>: ‘A series of thought experiments on time travel demonstrate that a constant irreversible rate of time usage underlies the concepts of opportunity cost, time preference, and interest. This leads to the startling suggestion that the root question in Economics concerns the choice of how to spend time.’</p>
<p>While choosing how to spend time impacts our longer term goals and life, research also shows that <em>finding </em>or<em> saving</em> time has a direct impact on the immediate experience of pleasure. Even the illusion or notion of having saved or lost time is enough to affect a person’s health and happiness. For example, consider the European practice of daylight savings. Researchers D Kuehnle and C Wunder outline the findings of a study in the <em>Journal of Happiness Studies</em>: ‘Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germany experience deteriorations in life satisfaction in the first week after the spring transition (where individuals lose one hour of time). We find no effect of the autumn transition (where individuals gain an hour of time). We attribute the negative effect of the spring transition to the reduction in the time endowment.’</p>
<p>Given the correlation between saving time and personal gratification, it is little wonder that Indian markets are flooded with a vast variety of devices, apps and services that promise to save us time. ‘Instant’, ‘express’, ‘quick’ and ‘speedy’ are some of the most heavily deployed terms in marketing campaigns today. “Convenience can be sacrificed, but time cannot. Even if there is a more convenient or indeed faster way to shop, market research shows that customers prefer to choose the option where they feel they are left with more time at their disposal. For example, buying standard groceries on an app [which may only come the next day or after a few hours] instead of physically crossing the street and going to the store,” observes Ahmedabad-based app designer, Tushar Gupta, adding that the most common brief he gets these days is to devise an app that will save time. “A few weeks ago, a client who works with couples wanted me to design an app that will help couples sort out fights and arguments by instantly connecting them to a third-party counsellor. The idea was that we will save people time by having someone sort out their problems as soon as possible,” says Gupta. He hopes to launch this app, Fix-That-Smile, later this month on iPhone and Android. The app will quote some studies in support of its proposed tagline: ‘Saving couples 12 minutes of wasted time per fight’.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Fix-That-Smile seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. We can now save time on just about anything. We can save time—for health (quick workouts, express recipes, 30-minute food delivery), for love (speed dating, same-day delivery of presents), for learning (personal news boards, quick feed services), for money (pre-scheduling investments, bills and business emails), and even for personal grooming (reminders for applying sunscreen, step-by-step guides to tying a tie, virtual avatars for trying different looks and hairstyles). But is time saved through any of these modern inventions of any value? Does that one minute saved in express airline check-in help us relax? Can instant slow-cooked food have the same taste and benefits of slow-cooked food? Will a 10-minute desk workout replace a walk in the park? Or are we simply slaves to the thrill of having shaved a few seconds off the clock?</p>
<p>“Time is more valuable than money today because it invokes private emotions. When I have to take time away from my newborn child, an ageing parent, a hobby I hold dear to my heart or even something as basic as sleep and relaxation, that time becomes doubly more valuable to me. So the fact that someone is telling me, ‘Here, I can save this precious resource for you,’ will never fail to strike that psychological and sentimental chord,” says Dr Vikas Gaur, a Delhi-based clinical psychologist. “One should be careful, however, of not letting this emotional appeal of time get in the way of sensible allocation of time. Don’t fall prey to giving less time to seemingly less enjoyable tasks that could be more beneficial than enjoyable ones. For example, a student might wish to play more video games. It might be a ‘quick’ game. But it would still eat into study or school time. And it would also be short enough to not allow proper rest and relaxation. Sometimes it makes more sense to devote proper time to recreation and work, so that one can get the full benefit of both.”</p>
<p>With its spiralling socio-economic value and simultaneous scarcity, its fleeting nature and civil worth, its emotional appeal and tricky utilisation, time is a gift both to ourselves and to those around us. How we choose to save it, manage it and spend it could well determine the quality of our life.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Clockwork1.jpg?itok=pihf9HfO" /><div>BY: Sonali Acharjee</div><div>Node Id: 24100</div>Wed, 21 Mar 2018 17:16:54 +0000vijayopen24100 at http://www.openthemagazine.com